Data Migration & Delivery: Experimenting with Amazon SimpleDB

A large relational database is populated with data which is collected on a national scale. When customers make requests for data from this database, greater than one hundred queries have to be run, per request, to generate a customer report. As the database grows in size, and simultaneously serves multiple clients, the speed and efficiency of this relational database implementation will be greatly affected. Response times will increase, as well as the load that will be placed on the server's resources.

Amazon Web Services' (AWS) SimpleDB may offer a solution to this problem. SimpleDB offers database functionality without the complexity of a relational database. It is an indexing system that stores references to data in attribute/value pairs. SimpleDB runs on an Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instance and the data is stored on an instance of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

This project will help to determine the feasibility of using this new "cloud" technology in a production environment. Many things will be considered in deciding whether or not to utilize this technology. These will include, but not be limited to, expenses, data transfer time and data delivery time.